Sotomayor and International Law

If other countries have 'good ideas' it's up to Congress, not the courts, to copy them.

By

Collin Levy

Updated July 14, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

Sonia Sotomayor will parry a wide range of questions about her judicial philosophy during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings in the Senate this week. The most revealing line of inquiry may be about her views on the use of foreign and international law when judging cases.

Like several of the judges on the left branch of the court, Judge Sotomayor has said she favors a broader consideration of foreign and international law in U.S. judicial opinions. While she rarely had occasion to dip into foreign sources during her time on the Second Circuit, she recently went out of her way to embrace the concept and its applications by the high court.

In a speech to the American Civil Liberties Union of Puerto Rico in April, Judge Sotomayor explained that "ideas have no boundaries," and that "international law and foreign law will be very important in the discussion of how to think about the unsettled issues in our own legal system." To discourage the use of foreign or international law, she added, would "be asking American judges to close their minds to good ideas."

That's political quicksand for a judge Democrats are eager to portray as a moderate inclined to narrow reading of text and precedent.

Of particular interest to the confirmation hearings will be Judge Sotomayor's favorable reference in the ACLU speech to the Supreme Court's reasoning in two recent cases citing foreign and international law: Roper v. Simmons and Lawrence v. Texas. In Roper, the Court drew on international criticism of the death penalty to buttress the argument that it should be prohibited for juveniles under the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

In Lawrence v. Texas, the court overturned a Texas statute against sodomy on the grounds that it violated due process. In his opinion for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited the European Court of Human Rights to show that the court's earlier decision in Bowers v. Hardwick was incorrect. In both those cases, Judge Sotomayor said, the court was using the foreign or international law to "help us understand what the concepts meant to other countries and . . . whether our understanding of our own constitutional rights fell into the mainstream of human thinking."

Cases like Roper and Lawrence fit squarely into that area of overseas law most sought after for borrowing by the more liberal justices of the court -- that is, the realms of moral or social policy. The problem with such inspiration is that it is inherently subjective and arbitrary. The laws of the world are infinitely diverse, and praising one necessarily condemns another. Cherry-picking desirable law introduces the very kind of legal chaos our Constitution was designed to prevent. If one judge may look to the courts of Western Europe for expansion of liberal thoughts on human rights, why may another not look to decidedly less liberal ideas?

Iran allows women who appear without a hijab on the streets to be lashed 74 times. China limits families to bearing one child. Even the democracies of Western Europe have laws that differ broadly from ours. Few countries, for instance, share our rules protecting the rights of the accused, or have the U.S.'s constitutionally mandated separation of church and state.

In his dissent from the court's reliance on foreign law in Roper v. Simmons, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that "The Court should either profess its willingness to reconsider all these matters in light of the views of foreigners, or else it should cease putting forth foreigners' views as part of the reasoned basis of its decisions. To invoke alien law when it agrees with one's own thinking and ignore it otherwise is not reasoned decision making, but sophistry."

There are plenty of ways to use foreign law appropriately -- most obviously in comparing standards for implementation in the case of treaties. Some judges have also looked to Constitutional antecedents like English jurist William Blackstone to help better understand the context and thinking of the Founders and their foundations in English common law.

Outside of that, using foreign law as a guidepost or inspiration raises issues of both sovereignty and democracy by permitting jurists outside the U.S. system to guide the trajectory of our democracy. The proper place for the consideration of whatever "good ideas" may be found in foreign law is not the courts but the Congress.

Judge Sotomayor insists in the ACLU speech that the brouhaha about foreign and international law is due to a misunderstanding about how she and others like Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would propose to use it. The point, she says, isn't that judges actually use foreign decisions as precedent (er, well, of course they don't), but that they open their minds to the intellectual force of their foreign counterparts.

But either foreign ideas carry weight by butressing judicial arguments, or they don't. Judicial opinions are written with great precision and care because they matter, and each strand of argument becomes a part of the grit and texture of American law.

No one is suggesting that judges stop reading or learning in ways that help expand their understanding of the law and the cases they are hearing. But that is an altogether different matter than official citation in a decision.

Our system of government has stood the test of time not in spite of but because it is uniquely drawn from the priorities of our own citizens, and them alone. The responsibility of the Supreme Court is neither to win an international beauty pageant, nor to encourage the export of our ideas. It is to extend principles of the Founders and the words of the Constitution into a world that still needs their wisdom.

Ms. Levy is a senior editorial writer for the Journal, based in Washington.

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